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The Sex Wars Costs
Why do women files 69% of divorces, yet seek marriage?
Marriage secures value transfers from men, but women may seek freedom when these transfers drop below the value of alternative opportunities, which tend to be richer for women than for men.
Women are more likely to desire marriage yet initiate 69% of divorces, such asymmetry in breakups is not observed for non married couples (Rosenfeld, 2017). Marriage often facilitates resource transfers from men to women, endorsed by actual or potential kids care needs. However, these transfers have diminishing value (also for extraction over assets split on divorce) and, at some point, may fall below the value of alternative dating opportunities, which are typically richer for women, triggering divorce filings.
Data supports this dynamic: higher income gaps between spouses reduce divorce likelihood, while narrowing the gap increases it. Women’s career advancements, such as C-level promotions, double their probability of divorce—a trend absent in men (Parker 2021). A 20% “child wage gap” further underscores the resource transfer rationale for marriage, making it a sustainable system for child-rearing.
Marriage can be viewed as a contract enforcing a transfer bid from a male winning a pretty intense competition for limited female reproductive capacity: over 75,000 years, only 25% of men passed on their Y chromosome compared to 100% of women (Zeng 2018).
This asymmetry gives median women more dating offers than median men, both in quantity and quality. Women often attract top-tier males by reproductive traits or those offering significant social and financial resources. Median men, by contrast, rarely gain similar attention and must often rely on social and monetary currency bids to compete.
Post-divorce, women typically benefit by fulfilling sexual selection instincts and receiving social and financial offers from competing males, while men face greater costs. This imbalance helps explain the gender asymmetry in divorce rates.
PS.
In non-married couples, men may be more proactive to end relationships when compensation demands become too high. In marriage, men can leverage constraints to suppress a partner’s alternatives and ignore such demands, prompting women to act proactively to remove these constraints (file divorce).
Income difference keeps women in marriage
Four men lose to one man in sexual selection each generation over 75,000 years
Over 75,000 Years: Males 4x Less Likely Than Females to Pass on DNA, with Top 25% of Men Fathering Nearly All Surviving Offspring—Extreme Cases Show 1 Male to 15 Females Ratio.
'These boots are made for walking': why most divorce filers are women. MF Brinig, DW Allen, American Law and Economics Review, Volume 2, Issue 1, January 2000, Pages 126–169,
Who Wants the Breakup? Gender and Breakup in Heterosexual Couples. Michael J. Rosenfeld, 2017
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